[Buying advice] Which hardware do i really need for my Server?

[Georg]

Hello!

After weeks of research for the ideal hardware for my small budget build, I finally found this forum . First of all sorry for my english and the dumb questions I'm going to ask .

After a job at a local it-service provider I first came in contact with virtualization at server class, and since then I wanted to build my own virtualized environment for small business use and media storage for my home network.

So what are my needs? The main function of the server should be to work as a simple NAS to store backups from two desktop computers (an iMac and a windows machine), and generally to store my whole data. So when there´s my whole data on this server, it would also be nice to use it as a DLNA server to stream everything to my Samsung "smart" TV. For this i would use PLEX, as there is an app avaiable for my TV which looks really gorgeous. I already tested running PLEX on my iMac and it worked really good. The only problem I had was that my digital camera makes videos in such a stupid format, so PLEX needed to transcode it. So i need decent power to make this work. The next thing I want to do is to run a game server (team fortress 2 or another free to play game) and a teamspeak server. since I now have a nice internet connection it shouldn't be a problem to do this with a acceptable latency. Me and my friends have already tested it and we've had pings from 20 ms to 50 ms, depending on their providers and how far they´re away from me. And finally i want to run something like pfSense as a router, firewall, dhcp and so on.

I hope I described my situation detailed enough .

My plan now was to build a ESXi server with affordable consumer hardware (as I see in this forum, I wasn´t the first one thinking about this ) and then running 3-4 virtual machines who are doing my needed tasks.

1 x windows for the game server
1 x probably centOS for PLEX and so on
1 x pfSense or something similar
1 x maybe Openfiler for cloud purpose

I already bought a RAID-Controller (MegaRAID SAS 9270-8i) and four 3TB drives. The RAID-Controller is ESXi compatible, I already tested this. With those drives I would make a RAID6 and store my data on it. I also have a 128GB SSD where my virtual machines would take place.

What I now need are suggestions for a Processor, Mainboard, RAM and maybe for a LAN-NIC.

I started my search on server hardware, realising soon that it's to expensive for me, and maybe also unnecessary for my performance needs. Than I saw that many people are using AMD-FX octacores for their ESXi servers, as they have passthrough capability and decent speed for the money. Also i have often read that an real octacore performs better than a quadcore with hyper threading when it comes to virtualization. Is that right?

The next thing is the RAM. Many people say that i should use ECC-Ram, as many of the AM3+ mainboards from ASUS support them. Do i really need them, since they cost a lot more than normal RAM?

And what about the network adapters? I know only ESXi 5.1 supported those realtek-NIC's, which are onboard on almost every consumer mainboard. How many ports do i really need? One for every virtual machine i run, and maybe two for the firewall as WAN and LAN? Sorry I'm a real noob at this !


I really hope you can help me on my decisions which hardware i should buy. I'm really losing my nerves slowly with this project . I´ve already tried to get answers on 3 different forums, and everyone is saying different things, and many of them don't know what they are talking about. My last try is in english, since it looks like that on hardforum are many people who did such things before !

With greetings from austria,

Georg

 

[Hagrid]

I don't understand what you said! I don't speak Austrian!(is that the language?)

Is there a price that you don't want to go above? I think that it would help with the selections.

 

[Georg]

I don't understand what you said! I don't speak Austrian!(is that the language?)

Is there a price that you don't want to go above? I think that it would help with the selections.

In Austria we speak german Don´t laugh because it took me 2 hours or something to write the post I had to lean my head to the right all the time, so that the whole english vocabulary what was left from school after 10 years of heavy drinking clotted together on one side. Google translate also helped me a lot hehe.

Let's say money isn´t that problem, but it wouldn't make sense if i spend 1000 € for something i don't need. When it would stay under 500 € it would be ok.


For orientation the AMD FX-8320 would cost about 130 € at my preferred shop.

Depending on my choice of the RAM (ECC or not) the mainboard would cost about 80-130 €

Normal RAM costs 120 € for a 2 x 8GB kit with 1600 MHZ CL9

ECC-RAM the cheapest 8GB module with 1333 MHZ CL9 about 80 €

And a Intel QUAD-NIC PCIe about 150 €


All together this would be about 500 € with normal RAM. Without a QUAD-NIC it would be of course much cheaper. So I need to know if I really need one.

Greetz Georg

 

[lopoetve]

In my humble opinion:
Skip the quad port nic, unless you're doing a NAS somewhere for shared storage for virtual machines
Skip ECC ram - it's a home setup, not production gear.
Get the FX, get as much RAM as you can, and do RAID 5 instead of 6, and make sure you have a Battery Backed Write Cache for the RAID controller to make it perform decently

Sehr gut!

 

[_Gea]

Another option with server parts that I would prefer and that are used by many for ESXi

SuperMicro uATX sercer class mainboard up from 150 Euro with 2 x Intel Nic + IPMI
http://www.supermicro.nl/products/motherboard/Xeon3000/#1150

add a i3 CPU (supports ECC) or a Xeon (supports ECC + vt/d=Hardware pass-through to guests)

add ECC RAM (I would use ECC, 16-32 GB)

use ZFS for storage (skip Openfiler), I use Solaris/OmniOS based storage systems
your hardware raidcontroller is fine for ESXi but not for ZFS storage

you should not virtualize storage with ESXi. You can virtualize a storage VM,
but you should pass-through the storage hardware (controller and disks) ex to a Solaris/OmniOS ZFS VM.

http://www.supermicro.nl/products/motherboard/Xeon/C220/X10SL7-F.cfm
would be a perfect solution for All-In-One (ESXi + virtualized NAS with a LSI controller 9207 alike onboard)

your LSI 9270 hardwareraid would be obsolete then and can be replaced with a more sophisticated software ZFS raid

 

[koolaidkitten]

I do all of that and more with the box in my Sig.
Pretty much the whole thing is just a old gaming box turned server.

 

[lopoetve]

Another option with server parts that I would prefer and that are used by many for ESXi

SuperMicro uATX sercer class mainboard up from 150 Euro with 2 x Intel Nic + IPMI
http://www.supermicro.nl/products/motherboard/Xeon3000/#1150

add a i3 CPU (supports ECC) or a Xeon (supports ECC + vt/d=Hardware pass-through to guests)

add ECC RAM (I would use ECC, 16-32 GB)

use ZFS for storage (skip Openfiler), I use Solaris/OmniOS based storage systems
your hardware raidcontroller is fine for ESXi but not for ZFS storage

you should not virtualize storage with ESXi. You can virtualize a storage VM,
but you should pass-through the storage hardware (controller and disks) ex to a Solaris/OmniOS ZFS VM.

http://www.supermicro.nl/products/motherboard/Xeon/C220/X10SL7-F.cfm
would be a perfect solution for All-In-One (ESXi + virtualized NAS with a LSI controller 9207 alike onboard)

your LSI 9270 hardwareraid would be obsolete then and can be replaced with a more sophisticated software ZFS raid

He's running a single server, no need for shared storage really, but yes, anything is better than OF for shared storage.

 

[Hagrid]

I do all of that and more with the box in my Sig.
Pretty much the whole thing is just a old gaming box turned server.

I have the same MB but am not sure if it supports ECC. Have you tried it? 8 cores, 32gb's of memory, vt-d, ecc(maybe), plenty of slots = nice esxi machine.

 

[Georg]

In my humble opinion:
Skip the quad port nic, unless you're doing a NAS somewhere for shared storage for virtual machines
Skip ECC ram - it's a home setup, not production gear.
Get the FX, get as much RAM as you can, and do RAID 5 instead of 6, and make sure you have a Battery Backed Write Cache for the RAID controller to make it perform decently

Sehr gut!

I try to explain what I wanted to do. My internet at home is a business connection. It's a DOCSIS-connection which is provided by a CISCO 800 series router (Photos of my internet equipement). On the router itself there is no firewall or something else active. Also all ports are opened. It gives me unfiltered internet, so i have to use equipement behind it. At the moment i use a normal WIFI-Router. I got 5 static IP-adresses. The first IP i would use exclusive for the gameserver and teamspeakserver, which i would directly connect to my cisco router, because i want to isolate it from the rest of the network(Because it will be avaiable to the public). The second one i would use for everything else like this:

Cisco router -> WAN from pfSense VM -> LAN from pfSense VM -> 24 port switch where i would connect all the rest of my devices

Would i need separate LAN-ports for this, or could i route it all over one single port, and use the VLAN's from ESXi? When i want to route everything through pfSense then i need at least two ports i think.

Thanks for the help so far! The first guys who know what they are talking about

 

[koolaidkitten]

I have the same MB but am not sure if it supports ECC. Have you tried it? 8 cores, 32gb's of memory, vt-d, ecc(maybe), plenty of slots = nice esxi machine.

No unfortunately I don't have any sitting around that I could try.

 

[lopoetve]

If you're doing that, then the quad-port makes sense. VLANs could also work, but depends more on the source for the internet understanding VLANs as well (I assume the cisco 800 and the wifi router do, but I don't have any experience with the 800 or whatever your router is).

Alternatively, a pair of dual-port nics are often cheaper (but not always).

 

[_Gea]

Cisco router -> WAN from pfSense VM -> LAN from pfSense VM -> 24 port switch where i would connect all the rest of my devices

Would i need separate LAN-ports for this, or could i route it all over one single port, and use the VLAN's from ESXi? When i want to route everything through pfSense then i need at least two ports i think.

If your switch supports vlans, go this route and connect all lans over a single physical nic. In ESXi you can create multiple vnics for every VM and assign them to the vlans.